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Chinese Tech Giants Pouring Cash Into AI Processors – FT

Alibaba, Tencent and Bytedance are splurging on AI processors and infrastructure to meet strong demand for large-language models and data centres


Nvidia is caught in the middle of a sad 'catch me if you can' game with US officials keen to limit China's access to advanced computer chips, according China's state media outlet the Global Times.
Analysts expect Nvidia to ship more than 1 million of its H20 chips, which cost $12-13,000 each, to China in coming months, amid a splurge for AI infrastructure. Photo: Reuters.

 

China’s biggest tech corporations have cranked up capital spending on infrastructure for artificial intelligence, according to a report by the Financial Times, which said Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu had doubled expenditure to 50 billion yuan ($7 billion) in the first half, while TikTok parent Bytedance had also boosted AI-spending.

Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu told investors this month the group would “continue to invest in R&D and AI capex to ensure the growth of our AI-driven cloud business” as many clients had great unmet demand. He said “as soon as we get a server up, that server is essentially instantly running at full capacity,” and “we can expect to see a very high ROI [return on investment] over these next quarters.”

Analysts expect US chip designer Nvidia to ship more than 1 million of its H20 processors, which have a reduced power threshold than the group’s leading chips the H100 and its upcoming Blackwell series, because of limits imposed by Washington, while Bytedance was buying hundreds of thousands of H20s for its data centres, while building computing infrastructure in Malaysia.

Read the full report: The FT.

 

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Jim Pollard

Jim Pollard is an Australian journalist based in Thailand since 1999. He worked for News Ltd papers in Sydney, Perth, London and Melbourne before travelling through SE Asia in the late 90s. He was a senior editor at The Nation for 17+ years.